Chip Malafronte: Auriemma deserves to be mentioned alongside Wooden

Coach Geno Auriemma speaks with fans as the UConn women’s basketball team is welcomed back to Storrs on Wednesday after winning its ninth national championship on Tuesday night against Notre Dame.
Peter Hvizdak — Register

As the Huskies were blowing the doors off Notre Dame en route to another national championship on Tuesday night in Nashville, Seth Davis of Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports sent out this meme via Twitter: “Geno about to win his 9th. Time to start talking about him as one of the greatest coaches of any sport ever. Deal with it.”

The response ranged from the reasonable (“UConn is loaded with high school All-Americans”) to the indignant (“one of the best coaches ever in a sport dominated by four teams. Laughable”) to the just plain silly (“Time for him to prove himself in the men’s game”).

As the critics hammered away, Davis tweeted a follow-up: “Everything y’all are tweeting me knocking Geno was said about Wooden. Trust me.” It was a noteworthy response given that Davis, in January, released a definitive 608-page biography, “Wooden: A Coach’s Life.”

For years, Auriemma has dismissed comparisons between himself and Wooden. But the fact is, he’s earned the right to be mentioned in the same breath as the Wizard of Westwood. Perhaps no other basketball coach in history, aside from Wooden, enjoyed titanic success through clean, honest methods and yet was so readily dismissed by a small but vocal band of critics.

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Wooden’s UCLA dynasty — 10 titles in 12 seasons — is hailed as the most dominant in college basketball. Four decades ago, there was an unimpressed faction with familiar gripes. Since he recruited the best players and won, success must be as simple as bringing a ball to practice and relaxing with a cold lemonade.

Perfection has been an expectation for UConn’s women for over a decade. Auriemma doesn’t simply recruit the best female high school players, he finds the ones with an amplified understanding of the game. On the heels of a 21-point stomping of Notre Dame on Tuesday, the Huskies were once again perfect, 40 wins, no losses, tied for the best season ever. The official tally is now nine championships over the past 20 seasons. Not quite Wooden territory. But Auriemma isn’t finished, either.

Still, there are many who continue to view UConn’s undefeated campaigns with disdain; who say it is “laughable” to measure Auriemma against Wooden.

Comparisons between the two are nothing new. The debate surfaced four years ago, when UConn broke UCLA’s 88-game win streak. It’ll truly heat up again when Geno ties, and then breaks Wooden’s record 10 national championships. And there’s no reason to believe that event isn’t inevitable. It will happen. Soon.

But his impact on the women’s game, like Wooden on the men’s, goes beyond wins and championships. Both helped their respective sport achieve unparalleled popularity, a foundation men’s basketball continues to build upon and one that, in theory, should do the same for the women.

UConn wins because Auriemma is a perfect coach, a teacher who preaches fundamentals and hard work. He’s helped draw media attention with his personality and sound bites.

Certainly, Auriemma’s remarkable success could be viewed as basis to re-examine the women’s game. Hype surrounding Tuesday’s national championship game was unprecedented, and justifiably so. UConn and Notre Dame marked the first time undefeated teams met in the national championship game in the history of college basketball.

It wasn’t all that long ago when the women’s title game was the only televised game of the season. On Tuesday, women’s basketball dominated ESPN’s SportsCenter, a trend that continued to Wednesday morning. Ratings were the sport’s highest in 10 years, fourth-best overall.

Yet the Huskies’ complete dominance of Notre Dame, while impressive and a testament to Auriemma’s brilliance, made it clear that the rest of the country still hasn’t caught up to UConn. More young women are playing basketball today than ever before, but the pool of true impact women players lags behind the men’s game.

“Women’s basketball is still about 40 years behind the men,” said Yale women’s coach Chris Gobrecht, a player at USC in the ’70s and a college coach the past 35 years. “We’re sort of on the same timeline since we started about 40 years later. It’s becoming a more popular and visible sport, but there’s going to be people who dominate because we’re behind on that timeline. It will get better.”

The nation eventually caught up to UCLA, though not until 1975, when Wooden won his 10th crown in 12 years and retired. At some point, the women’s game will catch up with UConn. Odds are that won’t happen until Auriemma finally decides to call it a career.

Auriemma turned 60 on March 23, an age when it’s fair to openly wonder how many more years a coach will stick around, even one clearly at the top of his profession. A few other noteworthy milestones are within his reach. At 879 career wins, he’ll hit 900 next season. The thousand mark should come in 2018; Pat Summitt’s all-time record 1,098 within range by the time he’s 67.

Perhaps by then, like Wooden in retirement, his legacy will be universally accepted, even though he’s already secured a place as one of the great coaches, men’s or women’s, of all time.